March 27, 2014

More Photos Can Be Shared Via Tweet Thanks To Twitter Update

Twitter introduced two new mobile features: the ability to tag people in photos and the ability to include multiple photos to accompany that 140 character post. The new features were discussed in a post on Twitter's blog.

"We’re rolling out two new mobile features that make photos on Twitter more social. One is photo tagging, which lets you tag the people in your photo; the other is the ability to include up to four photos in a Tweet," wrote César Puerta on the Twitter blog.

Each picture can have up to 10 people tagged and it will not affect the character count. The action of tagging will have a similar notification system to Facebook and other sites where people are tagged in photos. The person being tagged will get a notification. Notifications can be adjusted in the settings. The setting also controls who can tag you in photos.

The ability to tag clears up space for more description of the photo, or comment, in the tweet.

CNN reporter Heather Kelly states how obtrusive labeling photos within tweets can be: "Previously, you could work around Twitter's lack of image tags by just mentioning people from the photo in the tweet itself. But with precious few characters to work with, that could gobble up a lot of tweet real estate, especially if you were taking crowded group selfies."

While tagging people in photos adds content to each tweet, so does the ability to share up to four photos in one tweet. Twitter is calling the feature a collage. The ability to upload multiple photos is immediately available for iPhone, Android and Twitter.com users.

Both photo-tagging and tweets with multiple photos display in embedded tweets. Collages of four photos will automatically appear in a tiled format. The default setting is to allow anyone to tag you, so it is necessary to change the settings if there is concern about privacy.

"If you're not comfortable being tagged in images, immediately take a trip to the Twitter privacy settings. The default setting for the photo tagging is 'Allow anyone to tag me in photos.' It can be changed so that only people you already follow can tag you, or it can be turned off completely. It's also easy to untag yourself from any photos. Tap the three dots below the tweet and select 'Remove tag from photo.'" Kelly wrote on CNN.

Those with Twitter accounts that are locked to keep private can only tag people who follow them. The default setting for protected accounts is to not allow people to tag them in images. Twitter also prevents people who have been blocked from a user's account from tagging that user, CNN reports.

Twitter is billing this as a mobile feature, availability on Twitter.com means it is a site-wide rollout, and these features change Twitter.com as a whole. Twitter, among other social networks, have started introducing features in mobile, then migrating them to the web versions if they are successful. Earlier this year Twitter started making changes to Twitter Cards, which is a feature optimized for mobile.